It is not up to the release engineering team to support such massive rebuilds. A specific distribution tag should be created for Boost, instead. Then, the massive rebuild would be performed against that specific tag. There has been a discussion on the Fedora-devel mailing list about that topic. -- darnaud (Talk - Contrib) 16:38, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Detailed Description

That feature aims at synchronising the top of the Fedora tree with the current Boost upstream release. The current Fedora release is boost-1.47.0, folded into devel July 2011.

As of Fedora 13, the canonical sources used for the package switched from the official Boost release (with BJam build) to an alternate repository (with CMake build, for boost-1.41.0). That alternate repository has been deprecated and may be deleted any time soon (as of November 2011).
boost-1.41.0 has been delivered from that (now deprecated) Boost-CMake repository (hosted on Gitorious), where the code base had slightly diverged from upstream.

Moreover, the existing components and libraries are enhanced with new features and bug fixes. For instance, to name a few, Asio, Chrono, Geometry, Maths, Spirit have benefited from numerous bug fixes and small evolutions.

Scope

Upstream sources for Boost releases are evaluated, along with alternate repositories. One is selected, packaged according to Fedora package conventions and cognizant of existing package practices, tested, evaluated, and then built in Koji. This is then pushed to fedora devel. Dependencies are rebuilt. The unicorns are once again happy, and can go back to drinking champagne and complaining about slow build times.

How To Test

No special hardware is needed.

Testing of the Boost packages themselves requires the host system to have the boost-test package installed. Testing can then be enabled at package build time by passing --with tests. Note that that testing phase should be done only once per type of architecture and distribution version.

Once the Boost packages have been built and checked according to the previous step, testing simply consists in installing them on Fedora 16 and checking that it does not break any other package dependency.

Expected results: all the packages depending on Boost (for instance, hugin, gnash, pingus, kdeedu or k3d) should work properly on Fedora 16.

User Experience

Expected to remain largely the same.

Dependencies

There are a large number of dependencies for the boost package in Fedora. Following is a non-exhaustive list, collected from the first Rawhide report: